65
these to a post-war urban America (2012b, p.245). Both at rst closer to
Lucien Carr than one another, they worked separately with him on mani-
festos for an art that was—like Rimbaud’s poetry, like Nietzsche’s philoso-
phy and like Charles Baudelaire and André Gide’s Symbolist
manifestos—radically liberated from conventional moral responsibility.
5
If its title came from William Butler Yeats—and if Ginsberg in particular
was drawn to Yeats’ spiritualism and his restoration of ‘love’s mansion’ to
the bodily functions—the ‘New Vision’ that emerged in these early Beat
years was an unadulterated homage to the late nineteenth-century French
poets both saw incarnated in Carr.
6
For Ginsberg, newly arrived in
NewYork City from sleepy Patterson, New Jersey, learning the language
of poetry was the same as learning ‘Carr language: fruit, phallus, clitoris,
cacoethes, feces, foetus, womb, Rimbaud’ (2006, p.50). And for Kerouac,
whose recollections of this time are steeped in Rimbaudian allusions,
Carr’s European mystique inspired hope of escape out of the connes of
American bourgeois conformity. The group were, Kerouac writes,
embroiled in their own ‘very nostalgic Seasons of Hell’—and the dream was
to ee an America Lucian dismissed as ‘a pond that’s drying out’ for ‘Paris
on the verge of being liberated’ (2012b, p.206). On the left bank, they
fantasised, their gang could emerge transformed as ‘Symbolist Isidore
Ducesses and Apollinaires and Baudelaires and “Lautréamonts”’ (2012b,
p.209).
Rimbaud’s derangement of the senses is the keynote in accounts by all
three, and his attempt to achieve a higher perspectival plane—one on
which the beautiful co-existed with the horric, and conventional social
taboos were coded squeamish and cowardly. Reclining by the Hudson the
night before they tried and failed to enlist as seamen and sail for this
Symbolist paradise, it was that liberation through amorality that inspired
them. Remembering Claude with fondness but also the gruff lm noir-ish
affectation he adopts throughout Vanity of Duluoz, Kerouac describes the
two of them drunk and hollering into the darkness: ‘Plonger au fond du
grouffre, ciel ou enfer, qu’importe? [‘to plunge to the bottom of the abyss,
Heaven or Hell, what matter?’] and all those other Rimbaud sayings, and
Nietzschean’ (p.209).
Eventually, and signicantly, Kerouac and Ginsberg came to interpret
Rimbaud in less decadent terms than Carr’s. The ‘new vision’ Ginsberg
recorded in his diary was based on Rimbaud as a purposive poet—some-
one who had used Nietzsche’s template of the ‘anarchic poetic Dionysiac
archetype individual’ to move beyond earlier Symbolist gestures of ‘evil
3 JACK KEROUAC, ALLEN GINSBERG AND THEIR TRANSCENDENTALIST GLOOM